Skip to main content
The Website Services team at NHS England are testing early designs to understand how you find information. Your views will help us check our ideas work. Sign up to take part in our user research.

Downloads via MESH come through as a pair of files and some work is needed before you can access submitted data. These two files are:

  • a .dat file, which is the payload/data being transferred;
  • a .ctl file, which is the accompanying control file that tells you what the .dat file contains. Read Appendix A  for an example of the .ctl file’s contents

To access the contents of the .dat file, the extension needs to be renamed to .tar.gz as the data is transferred in a Gzip archive file. Within this archive file you will find the following files depending on the nature of the submission.

Submitted file Validation Report Submission.json*
Successful submission with no validation report Yes No Yes
Successful submission with a validation report Yes Yes Yes
Unsuccessful submission with a validation report No Yes Yes

*A JSON file containing metadata is included within each archive file (see Appendix B for examples)

Note that where there is an unsuccessful submission without a validation report, nothing will be received via MESH.



Last edited: 1 March 2023 5:18 pm